Awakening of India - 1947

Rawalpindi – General Headquarters – October to December 1947

The cigarette smoke hung thick in the cramped operations room at GHQ Rawalpindi, mingling with the acrid smell of sweat and desperation that had become the permanent atmosphere of Pakistan's military nerve center.

Maps covered every available wall surface, their edges curling from the humid October heat, dotted with colored pins that told a story of initial triumph slowly curdling into something far more ominous.

General Akbar Khan stood hunched over the Kashmir situation map, his uniform wrinkled from another sleepless night, his eyes bloodshot but still burning with the fervor that had driven Operation Gulmarg from its inception.

The tribal lashkars had swept through the valley like wildfire in those intoxicating early days, Baramulla had fallen so easily it seemed almost ordained by divine will.

"Liaquat Sahib!" Khan had burst into the Prime Minister's office just weeks earlier, his voice cracking with euphoria. "Baramulla has fallen! Our brave tribesmen are proving unstoppable! Srinagar, the prize itself, is within our grasp!"

The memory of that moment still sent shivers through the Pakistani leadership. Even the Quaid-e-Azam himself, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, despite his characteristic caution about international complications, had allowed himself a rare smile.

The dream of Kashmir, Muslim Kashmir, rightfully theirs, seemed so tantalizingly close you could almost taste the mountain air of liberated Srinagar.

Those early weeks had been intoxicating. Their fledgling Royal Pakistan Air Force, cobbled together from a handful of Tempests and training Harvards, had conducted reconnaissance missions over the valley, occasionally dropping supplies to the advancing tribesmen.

The pilots returned with tales of fleeing Indian forces and burning villages. Victory seemed inevitable.

But then everything began to unravel with sickening speed.

The first blow came like a punch to the gut, Indian transport aircraft roaring into Srinagar airport in broad daylight, disgorging fresh troops while Indian Air Force Spitfires and Tempests swept the skies clean of Pakistani aircraft.

Within days, their modest air support for Kashmir was reduced to twisted metal scattered across mountain ridges.

Flight Lieutenant Mahmood had been one of the few RPAF pilots to survive those early aerial encounters. His hands still shook when he recounted the experience to his squadron mates: "They came out of nowhere, three Spitfires diving from the sun. Rashid didn't even have time to call out a warning before his Tempest was spinning into the valley floor. I barely made it back to base with my engine smoking like a steam train."

The psychological impact was devastating. Pakistan's tiny air force, already stretched impossibly thin, simply couldn't contest Indian air superiority over Kashmir.

Within weeks, their remaining aircraft were withdrawn to protect West Pakistani airspace, leaving the tribal fighters exposed to relentless Indian air attacks.

By November, the euphoric reports from Kashmir had transformed into increasingly desperate pleas for reinforcement.

The lashkars, facing disciplined Indian regulars supported by artillery and close air support, were losing their appetite for martyrdom. More Pakistani "volunteers", regular army units stripped of their insignia, were fed into the Kashmir meat grinder, turning what was supposed to be a swift liberation into a bloody stalemate along the Uri-Poonch line.

General Messervy, the British acting Commander-in-Chief, had tried repeatedly to inject realism into the discussions. "Gentlemen, we're committing forces we can't afford to lose in terrain that heavily favors the defender. The Indians are reinforcing faster than we can, and they have complete air superiority."

But the fever dreams of Kashmir liberation had infected the entire Pakistani command structure. Intelligence reports from their Delhi network, carefully manipulated by Colonel Sharma's counter-intelligence operation, painted a picture of Indian forces stretched to breaking point, focused entirely on holding Kashmir at enormous cost.

The Pakistani leadership swallowed these reports like drowning men gulping seawater.

"Our intelligence confirms the Indians are bleeding white in Kashmir," General Khan had declared confidently in early December. "They've committed everything to holding that valley. They have nothing left for adventures elsewhere."

How catastrophically wrong they were.

The Eastern Thunderbolt

December 15th, 1947, a date that would be seared into Pakistani memory forever. The call came through at 0630 hours, crackling over the radio in the GHQ communications center with an urgency that sent the night duty officer sprinting through the corridors.

"Sir! Sir! Emergency flash from Dhaka Command!"

The message was brief, brutal, and almost incomprehensible: "UNDER MASSIVE ASSAULT. MULTIPLE DIVISIONS. ARMOR SUPPORT. REQUEST IMMEDIATE REINFORCEMENT."

Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan's face drained of color as the implications sank in. East Pakistan, their eastern wing, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory, was under full-scale attack. Not border skirmishes. Not limited incursions. Full-scale invasion.

"But this is impossible," he whispered, his voice barely audible above the suddenly frantic activity in the operations room. "Our intelligence... our sources in Delhi... they assured us the Indians were fully committed in Kashmir. How can they possibly mount major operations in the east?"

General Messervy, his professional composure cracking for the first time since Partition, spread the intelligence reports across the table with trembling hands. "Prime Minister, these reports speak of multiple Indian divisions, armor formations, close air support... This isn't a raid or a probe. This is a full-scale invasion designed for territorial conquest."

The radio crackled again with desperate transmissions from the east. Jessore had fallen within hours. Sylhet was under siege. Indian columns were racing toward Comilla and Chittagong while their air force systematically destroyed Pakistani communication nodes and supply dumps.

General Niazi's voice, distorted by static and barely controlled panic, came through on the secure line from Dhaka: "GHQ, this is Eastern Command. We are facing overwhelming odds. Indian armor is punching through our defenses like paper. Our air assets are gone, destroyed on the ground or shot down. Without immediate reinforcement, we cannot hold."

The silence in the Rawalpindi operations room was deafening.

How could they reinforce across hostile Indian territory? How could they spare troops when they were already overcommitted in Kashmir? The mathematical impossibility of their situation began to dawn on the assembled officers like a slow-spreading poison.

The question hung heavy in the air: Where were these Indian soldiers coming from? Had Britain secretly re-armed India? Were there mercenaries?

The reality of Arjun's rapidly mobilized and deployed Partition Volunteer Corps – 300,000 strong, driven by a burning vengeance and integrated with regular units – was beyond their comprehension. They were fighting ghosts, an army that wasn't supposed to exist on this scale.

Jinnah himself arrived at GHQ later that morning, his normally immaculate appearance disheveled, his gaunt frame seeming even more fragile under the weight of the crisis.

The Quaid-e-Azam, architect of Pakistan, stood before the Kashmir map in stunned silence before turning to face his generals.

"This is treachery," he said quietly, his voice carrying a cold fury that made seasoned officers flinch. "The world must witness India's naked aggression. We will not allow this... this dismemberment to proceed unchallenged."

But the world was slow to react, its attention fragmented. And India, through Krishna Menon at the UNSC, was already skillfully painting Pakistan as the original aggressor in Kashmir, with the atrocities in Baramulla providing ample lurid evidence, in 3-4 meeting that had happened past two months.

Even as Jinnah spoke the defiant words, everyone in that room understood the bitter truth: they were watching their eastern wing being systematically severed, and there was virtually nothing they could do to prevent it.

The Western Dagger

Just as the Pakistani leadership began to absorb the scale of the eastern disaster, the second blow fell with equally devastating precision.

December 18th brought reports that seemed to defy all military logic, Indian naval forces had materialized off the Makran coast like ghosts, launching amphibious assaults at Karachi coast.

"Karachi?" General Khan's voice cracked as he read the intelligence flash. "They dare to assault our capital? Our principal port?"

The Pakistani Navy, such as it was, had been caught completely off-guard. Their handful of aging frigates and patrol boats were either bottled up in Karachi harbor or scattered by overwhelming Indian naval superiority.

Reports from the Balochistan coast painted a picture of swift, professional amphibious operations, Indian armed forces storming ashore under heavy naval gunfire support while transport aircraft dropped paratroopers to secure inland objectives.

The psychological impact on Karachi was immediate and devastating. Air raid sirens wailed for the first time since the city's founding as Indian Air Force reconnaissance flights appeared overhead like harbingers of doom.

Panic began to grip the streets as rumors spread of Indian naval guns trained on the city's harbor installations.

"Our forces are stretched beyond all reasonable limits," General Messervy announced to the emergency cabinet meeting, his voice heavy with professional despair.

"We are fighting a multi-front war with single-front resources. In Kashmir, we're bogged down in a stalemate that's bleeding us white. In East Pakistan, we're facing defeat in detail. And now our own capital is under direct threat."

The Khan of Kalat's alliance with India had been another stunning blow, suddenly, Indian forces had secure bases and local support throughout Balochistan. West Pakistan found itself being squeezed from directions they had never seriously considered defending.

As December wore on, the Pakistani high command faced an agonizing choice: continue reinforcing the Kashmir stalemate or attempt to save their crumbling western defenses. The decision, when it finally came, was as painful as it was inevitable.

"Pull back from the advanced positions in Kashmir," came the order that no Pakistani officer wanted to give or receive. "Redeploy to defend Lahore and the Punjab heartland."

But the retreat from Kashmir became a nightmare of military logistics. Units that had been dug into mountain positions for weeks were suddenly ordered to disengage under pressure, pack their equipment, and race southward through winter weather and increasingly aggressive Indian air attacks.

The roads became choked with military convoys, civilian refugees, and broken-down vehicles while Indian pilots, finally able to operate with impunity, turned the withdrawal into a shooting gallery.

Captain Rashid of the 6th Punjab Regiment would later describe the retreat as "a preview of hell." His battalion, reduced to half-strength after weeks of mountain fighting, found themselves strung out along the Grand Trunk Road under constant aerial harassment.

"We'd dive for the ditches every time we heard aircraft engines. Half our transport was destroyed before we even reached Rawalpindi. The men were exhausted, demoralized, angry. They couldn't understand how we'd gone from the verge of victory to this... this humiliation."

The Noose Tightens

By late December, intelligence reports filtering into GHQ painted an even grimmer picture. Indian forces were massing for a major offensive into the Punjab, aimed directly at Lahore, the cultural heart of Pakistani Punjab.

The prospect of losing Lahore sent shockwaves through the Pakistani establishment that went far beyond mere military considerations.

"If Lahore falls," Liaquat Ali Khan said quietly during one late-night crisis meeting, "we lose more than a city. We lose the soul of Pakistani Punjab. We lose our legitimacy in the eyes of our own people."

The retreating units from Kashmir, battered and demoralized, were supposed to reinforce the Lahore defenses. But Arjun Mehra's intelligence network had anticipated this exact move, and the timing of Indian operations had been calculated with surgical precision.

Many of the retreating Pakistani units would arrive too late, too disorganized, or would be intercepted while still in march formation.

Not to mention, Brigadier Sen, along with battle-hardened PVC soldiers will start pushing towards Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, without giving retreating Pakistani forces any room to breathe.

The mood in Rawalpindi by year's end was one of stunned disbelief mixed with growing panic. The confident predictions of easy victory in Kashmir had transformed into a desperate struggle for national survival.

East Pakistan was effectively lost, with Indian forces closing in on Dhaka. Karachi remained under siege, its port facilities targeted by Indian naval bombardment.

The cream of Pakistan's limited air force lay scattered across Kashmir's mountains. And now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Lahore, faced the prospect of siege and conquest.

In the GHQ operations room, where colored pins on maps told the story of a nation's agony, officers whispered of intelligence failures, of traitors, of colossal strategic miscalculation.

The serpent of Pakistan, which had struck so confidently at Kashmir just months earlier, now found itself coiled in ever-tightening defensive positions, its fangs blunted against the disciplined steel of Arjun Mehra's multi-front offensive.

The new year of 1948 promised only further trials. The psychological dismantling of Pakistan's foundational myths was nearly complete.

Operation Bharat Shakti had achieved something far more devastating than mere military victory, it had shattered the very conception of Pakistani destiny, leaving a proud new nation reeling, bleeding, and fighting desperately for its survival in the unforgiving crucible of subcontinental warfare.